Quote

A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.

Marilynne Robinson

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Marilynne Robinson
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: November 26
Essayist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Sandpoint
Idaho
Marilynne Summers Robinson
Marilynne S. Robinson
Son
Father
Stills
Still
Might
Nothing
Incomprehension
Men
Mutual
Love
Loyalty

More quotes by Marilynne Robinson

Image
The assumption behind any theology that I've ever been familiar with is that there is a profound beauty in being, simply in itself. Poetry, at least traditionally, has been an educing of the beauty of language, the beauty of experience, the beauty of the working of the mind, and so on. The pastor does, indeed, appreciate it.
Marilynne Robinson
Image
It's not a man's working hours that is important, it is how he spends his leisure time.
Marilynne Robinson
Image
I don't know exactly what covetous is, but in my experience it is not so much desiring someone else's virtue or happiness as rejecting it, taking offense at the beauty of it.
Marilynne Robinson
Image
The attention of the congregation is a major part of the attention that the pastor gives to his or her utterance. It's very exceptional. I don't know anyone who doesn't enjoy a good sermon. People who are completely nonreligious know a good sermon when they hear one.
Marilynne Robinson
Image
Sometimes my doubt seems intuitive, but most likely it derives from an implausibility or a logical problem I may at first find difficult to identify and articulate. It is interesting to me to work through questions that arise in this way.
Marilynne Robinson
Image
This morning the world by moonlight seemed to be an immemorial acquaintance I had always meant to befriend. If there was ever a chance, it had passed. Strange to say, I feel a little that way about myself.
Marilynne Robinson
Image
The locus of the human mystery is perception of this world. From it proceeds every thought, every art.
Marilynne Robinson
Image
I sometimes am discouraged by what seems to be a sort of conventional disparagement of humankind. I think often people feel that they are doing something moral when they are doing that, but that's not how I understand morality. I much prefer the everyone is sacred, and everybody errs model of reality.
Marilynne Robinson
Image
You have to live with your mind your whole life.
Marilynne Robinson
Image
Weary or bitter of bewildered as we may be, God is faithful. He lets us wander so we will know what it means to come home.
Marilynne Robinson
Image
Of my conception I know only what you know of yours. It occurred in darkness and I was unconsenting... By some bleak alchemy what had been mere unbeing becomes death when life is mingled with it.
Marilynne Robinson
Image
It was a source of both terror and comfort to me then that I often seemed invisible - incompletely and minimally existent, in fact. It seemed to me that I made no impact on the world, and that in exchange I was privileged to watch it unawares.
Marilynne Robinson
Image
I have always liked the phrase nursing a grudge because many people are tender of their resentments as of the thing nearest their hearts.
Marilynne Robinson
Image
To think that only faultless people are worthwhile seems like an incredible exclusion of almost everything of deep value in the human saga. Sometimes I can't believe the narrowness that has been attributed to God in terms of what he would approve and disapprove.
Marilynne Robinson
Image
My politics, and my religion as well, are based entirely on the loveliness and value of ordinary human lives. The creaky apparatus called politics shelters or oppresses or threatens these lives, and is therefore of interest.
Marilynne Robinson
Image
When things are taking their ordinary course, it is hard to remember what matters.
Marilynne Robinson
Image
I think I am like most people in letting myself worry about things that didn't matter. Concepts like quotidian and humdrum prevented me for years from really absorbing the miraculous strangeness of bombing around a star on a tottering planet, of watching the world unfold in time.
Marilynne Robinson
Image
A little too much anger, too often or at the wrong time, can destroy more than you would ever imagine.
Marilynne Robinson
Image
The best essays come from the moment in which people really need to work something out.
Marilynne Robinson
Image
I'm amazed at what I have taken for granted. How to truly take in our situation I don't know, but I wish I had started asking myself that question earlier than I did.
Marilynne Robinson